TECH TIP: Readability
StatisticsMicrosoft Word has a built-in
tool to give you a variety of statistics about your
document. It works with your spell checker.
When you complete your spell check, you can get
readability statistics about your document.
Like:

How
many words, characters,
paragraphs, and sentences
are in your document. And,

What
is the average number of
sentences, words per sentence,
or charactersperword.

In
addition you can get readability scores
based on a formula (or algorithm) on the average number
of words per sentence and syllables per word. Here are
the 2 reports you will receive:

The
Flesch Reading Ease score: This
rates your document on a 100 point scale.
The higher the score, the easier it is to understand
the document. A score of 60 to 70 would be a score
that most people would be able to read with ease.

The
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score:
This gives you the grade level at
which your document is written. According to
current statistics, the largest percent of the
population can only read at a 6th-8th grade reading
level?

There is
one other statistic the Readability Statistics gives;
Passive Sentences. You should keep
your use of passive sentences between 5 and 10
percent – the lower the better. Why? Because
the passive voice is not as interesting and exciting as
the active voice. Go to this website and read about the
passive voice and the active voice.

(During
the election John Kerry used passive
sentences about twice as many times as George
Bush. (You mean he lost the election
because he used too many passive sentences?)

OK – How
do you activate the Readability Scores?
Follow these steps:

Open
Microsoft Word

Click on Tools

Click on Options

Click on the Spelling and Grammar
tab

Click the square next to Show readability
statistics

Click OK

Now,
open a Word document and check the spelling. The
shortcut key to check spelling is
F7 (the F keys are at the top of
the keyboard). At the end of the spell check, you
will get Readability Statistics – including the Flesch
Reading Ease score and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score
and how many Passive Sentences you used. (Too bad
Kerry didn’t read this Tech Tip!)

You
will get the rating for passive
sentences if you activate Readability Scores,
but if you want to check for passive
sentences (and a host of other items), when you do a
spelling and grammar check, you need to select those
options. Go to the Tools Menu, click
on Options, click on the
Spelling and Grammartab,
click on the Settings button, scroll
down to the Style section, and click on
Passive Sentences. Also click on any
other options you want the Grammar Checker to check.

OK – so
how did I do? Here are the readability
statistics for this Tech Tip:

Words:
518

Characters: 2561

Paragraphs: 32

Sentences: 29

Average
sentences per paragraph: 3.6

Average
words per sentence: 14.3

Characters per Word: 4.5

Passive
Sentences: 4% (Hmm – I could run for president)

Flesch
Reading Ease: 64.3

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 7.7

Here’s a
neat site to learn more about Readability
Scores. You can test the readability of a web
site here also.